Walking Raven

Hardened Hearts

Though debated, I think it is fair to say the prevalent view in Judeo-Christian belief is that Yahweh endowed Adam and Eve with free will. I don’t have a problem with that. I do have a problem with Yahweh’s demonstrated penchant for interfering with the normal course of human events with an end to influencing the progress or outcome such events. Take, for example, the protracted negotiations between Moses and Pharaoh regarding the liberation of the Jews as recounted in Exodus, Chapters 4 through 14. At the end of Chapter 4, Yahweh commands Moses, “to perform before Pharaoh all the wonders that I have put in your power.” Should these wonders in and of themselves prove the means to accomplish the end for which he was sending them, however, Yahweh goes on to reveal that he intends to “harden [Pharaoh’s] heart, so that he will not let the people go.”1

The writer of Exodus suggests that at the conclusion of their initial meeting after Aaron’s staff-turned-snake swallows up all the Pharaoh’s magicians’ staffs-turned-snakes, Pharaoh was inclined to end it then and there, except “Pharaoh’s heart was hardened and he would not listen to them.” Exodus 7:13. In the ensuing chapters, the phrase “hardened heart,” or a variation thereof, appears more than a baker’s dozen times as the reason for Moses and Aaron’s lack of success. Instead, the Nile must be turned to blood and the land of Egypt and its people made to suffer from frogs, gnats, flies, pestilence, boils, thunder and hail, locusts, and darkness. Before sending the swarm of locusts, Yahweh leaves no doubt that He is behind Pharaoh’s stubbornness, telling Moses to “[g]o to Pharaoh; for I have hardened his heart and the heart of his officials, in order that I may show these signs of mine among them, and that you may tell your children and grandchildren how I have made fools of the Egyptians and what signs I have done among them—so that you may know that I am the Lord.” Exodus 10:1-2.

Ultimately, He hardens Pharaoh’s heart so that at midnight He can send the angel of death to strike down “all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sat on his throne to the firstborn of the prisoner who was in the dungeon, and all the firstborn of the livestock.” Exodus 12:29. This last act induces Pharaoh to give the Israelites leave to depart. But Yahweh isn’t done yet. He hardens Pharaoh’s heart so he will pursue the Israelites.2 Exodus 14:8. Finally, after having Moses stretch out his hand to part the Red Sea, and after making sure the Israelites will get safely across, Yahweh hardens “the hearts of the Egyptians so that they will go in after them,” and thereby meet their watery end. Exodus 14:15.

Though Exodus is by far and away the most striking example of Yahweh’s practice in this regard, a search of the term “hardened” reveals several instances where He sees fit to harden hearts (or spirits, necks, even faces) throughout the Bible. Kind of makes me wonder about other Pharaoh-types. Say, for instance, Pontius Pilate (but I’m getting way ahead of myself – so far ahead in fact I’m not even sure that’s where I’m going). In light of the above, maybe the next time you’re tempted to say, “The devil made me do it,” you’ll find yourself wondering if it isn’t Yahweh’s influence instead. It also makes me wonder what might happen if it were just up to us humans and all we had was our threescore and ten, give or take. Psalm 90:10.

I found the idea that we are somehow being manipulated by the “powers that be” to behave inhumanely troubling long before I started thinking about The First Voice . This entry, however, stems from some follow-up research I conducted with respect to the already posted entry entitled “The First Quotation.” In that entry I reveal that the opening quotation is from Isaiah 6:6-7 which reads “Then flew one of the seraphims unto me, having a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with the tongs from off the altar; And he laid it upon my mouth, and said, Lo, this hath touched thy lips; and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged.” On the morning in question (September 15, 2005 to be exact), I looked up the passage in my Oxford’s New Revised Standard Version so as to compare it with its King James’ counterpart.

Then I did something I’m fairly certain I had not done before, I read the rest of the chapter. For those of you who have been reading my blog from the beginning, or for those of you who have taken my suggestion and are reading the entries chronologically earliest to latest, you’ll perhaps understand why I can still remember I experienced an adrenaline rush as I read the line: “Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” Id. at 6:8. I had stumbled upon a hitherto undiscovered instance of God conversing with the mysterious “Us.” See September 13, 2005 Post. You may also understand why I experienced a chilling sensation as I read the next few verses — though neither the words “harden” nor “heart” appears in the passage, the intent is unmistakable. Isaiah continues:

And I said, “Here am I; send me!” And he said, “Go and say to this people:
Keep listening, but do not comprehend;
keep looking, but do not understand.
Make the mind of this people dull,
and stop their ears,
and shut their eyes,
so that they may not look with their eyes,
and listen with their ears,
and comprehend with their minds,
and turn and be healed.

Then I said, “How long, O Lord?” And he said:
Until cities lie waste without inhabitant,
and houses without people,
and the land is utterly desolate;
until the Lord sends everyone far away,
and vast is the emptiness in the midst of the land.

Id. at 8-12.

If I’ve said it once . . . “We have met the enemy and . . .”

______________________

1 It appears the only reason the Israelites were in this mess in the first place was because Yahweh had forgotten about them again. At least He tells Moses the reason He’s sending him to Egypt is because “I have also heard the groaning of the Israelites whom the Egyptians are holding as slaves, and I have remembered my covenant.” See “Of Rosemary and Flies to Wanton Boys,” September 9, 2005 Post. We learn in Exodus 12:40 that Yahweh’s memory lapse in this instance lasted somewhere in the neighborhood of 430 years. Yet again I suggest we can all pretty much ignore the admonition Cave, Cave Dominus videt [“Careful, careful, God is watching”].

2 To write this entry, I reread the pertinent portions of Exodus and when I got to this juncture, I experienced what chat-room inhabitants and text messengers describe as an LOL moment. The writer of Exodus tells us that upon discovering that Pharaoh and his army were in hot pursuit, the Israelites, who had spent hundreds of years in captivity building the pyramids, confront Moses with the question, “Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness?” Exodus 14:11.

Copyright © 2006 by cko.

Proxemics

Each morning I pour a cup of coffee, fire up my computer, and check my email. I subscribe to two daily emails, the Oxford English Dictionary Word of the Day and the Writer’s Almanac. A couple weeks ago, one of the OED words was “proxemics,” a term coined in the 1960s to signify “the branch of knowledge that deals with the amount of space that people feel it necessary to set between themselves and others.” I was reminded that as a freshman at the University of Minnesota in 1973, I participated in an experimental program called “Interdisciplinary Studies.” All of my courses — save one elective (which, I’m proud to say was the first course formerly offered by the newly created Women’s Studies Department) — contained elements from a number of disciplines. Hence, for instance, “English 101” became “Communications 101.” In the course we studied cultural differences in the way people communicate, including the need for “personal space” in the process of doing so. I learned to be more tolerant of those individuals who wanted to have a conversation “up front and personal” and to check my tendency for hurt feelings if adjustments were made in that regard by individuals with whom I was communicating. Thirty and then some years later, I now have a word for those differences.

The appearance of the term also gave me the impetus I needed finally to sit down and organize my thoughts about another subject involving personal space that has been drifting in and out of my consciousness for awhile, that subject being the physical awareness of myself. During the early days of this blog, I wrote about an idea that came crashing through my brain one day — the significance of the irregularity of the verb “to be” and what it is to “am” as opposed to “be.” See April 21, 2004 Post. Both before and after that epiphany, I’ve spent my fair share of time thinking about being and nothingness or sameness and otherness having been introduced during that same timeframe thirty years ago to de Beauvoir and The Second Sex via Women’s Studies and Sartre via a class on Existentialism taken to satisfy my foreign language requirement. (Ah, the idyllic days of a liberal arts education in the 70s.) It was not until I read Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief by Andrew Newburg, M.D. in connection with my research for The First Voice, however, that I realized the necessity for my brain to have a sector housing the neurons that enable me to apprehend that I am encased in skin which skin forms the boundary between myself and the rest of the universe.

According to Newburg, “the proper name of this highly specialized bundle of neurons is the “posterior superior parietal lobe” which he dubs the “Orientation Association Area or OAA.” Id. at p. 4. He goes on to observe “it may seem strange that the brain requires a specialized mechanism to keep tabs on this you/not-you dichotomy; from the vantage point of normal consciousness, the distinction seems ridiculously clear. But that’s only because the OAA does its job so seamlessly and so well.” Id. at p. 5.

The visual of this dichotomy is easy; I can see myself in a mirror. Feeling the dichotomy is a little iffier. Unless I am touching something, I don’t have a sensation of being separate. Once this thought came to the forefront, however, I began to notice the role warmth plays in defining me to me. For instance, when I first get into bed and pull the covers over me, I experience the sensation of the atmosphere warming around my body and I become aware of my “blobbness,” i.e., the pool of warmth I am thanks to whatever chemical processes heats my blood to 98.6° F. Feeling myself as a blob is “being,” and that in and of itself is quite delicious. But knowing I am a blob is “am-ing” and that, for me, encapsulates Hamlet’s “rub.” As Newburg explains:

There seems to be, within the human head, an inner, personal awareness, a free-standing, observant itself. We have come to think of this self, with all its emotions, sensations, and cognitions, as the phenomenon of mind. Neurology cannot completely explain how such a thing can happen — how a somehow nonmaterial mind can rise from mere biological function; how the flesh and blood machinery of the brain can suddenly become “aware.” Science and philosophy, in fact, have struggled with this question for centuries, but no definitive answers have been found, and none is clearly on the horizon.

Id. at p. 32. Perhaps my limited knowledge of mathematics makes me naïve, but I am confident that one day someone will come up with the mathematics to answer the question. Until then, in The First Voice, my character Michael Sadek will draw on certain tenets of quantum physics to explain the phenomenon to Elfredge. But because I in particular, and we in general, still lack the math, his explanation will require him to resort, as have so many others in the past with varying degrees of success, to metaphor. At present, then, Michael’s story goes something like this:

Back in imaginary time before the big bang, our universe consisted of a single point of zero size and infinite density, known as a “singularity.” One way to explain this phenomenon is to imagine the Platonic ideal of the verb “to be.” This singularity was comprised of planck-length particles known as strings which were all vibrating in the unity of “be-ness” that sounded surprisingly like the Buddhist manta, “om mani padme hum.” And then, one of those strings squawked, “I am.” The force occasioned by this irregularity caused the singularity to explode at the precise spot where the spacetime curvature becomes infinite, blasting a primordial black hole crater and creating the universe in its wake.

Thirteen billion and some years later, the original I-am string, along with a number of variations on its theme (collectively known as the Elohim to some) [see January 28, 2006 Post], arrived at a solar system revolving around a star that would come to be known as the Sun located on the outskirts of a galaxy that would come to be known as The Milky Way. These string formations went into orbit around one of the planets in the solar system that would come to be known as Earth. Once there, they used the materials present in the primordial soup to make blobs designed to encompass and form a symbiotic relationship with a grouping of strings comprised of innumerable “be” or “soul” strings and one dormant “am” or “mind” string. Electrical impulses set off at the start of this relationship caused the “am” string to begin vibrating at a frequency that engendered consciousness.

I’ll stop now before I give everything away. “But wait!” you say, “What has any of this to do with proxemics?” Well, based on the above, the meaning of the term needs to be expanded to include the branch of knowledge that deals with the amount of space that a mind feels it necessary to set between itself and other minds so as to avoid reassimalation with the other stings and thereby once again become one with the universe.

Copyright © 2006 by cko.